


Discombobulate

by rainer76



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: All the Stilinski feels, Episode Tag, Family, Gen, Spoilers for 2x12
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-15
Updated: 2012-08-15
Packaged: 2017-11-12 05:12:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/487084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainer76/pseuds/rainer76
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Where is my son?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Discombobulate

_“I caught her doing a hundred and twenty-two down the highway.” He has a cops sensibilities and a cop’s sense of humour, dry as dust and so spare it takes the table a minute to figure out if he’s joking._

_(for the record – he’s not)_

_“It wasn’t that fast,” she disagrees. An’s autumn colours and willow grace, her smile hangs mysterious as the moon. “It was one-twenty at the most.”_

_“In a jeep.”_

_“It’s a very fly jeep.”_

_There are smirks at the table or polite laughter; fly doesn’t begin to cover her vehicle, it’s a rust bucket held together on a whim. “Did you arrest her?” someone else asks, pouring more wine. There’s the clatter of cutlery against plates, the smell of roasted lamb and thyme._

_“Impounded the jeep…it was the only way I could make her stay.”_

_An’s fingers slip through his, touches his cheek, the corner of his lip, alight on his skin. She tilts his head to the correct position and kisses him tender. Kisses him, one finger tucked against his throat, hooked beside his pulse point, she kisses slowly, melting soft. “I would have stayed for you,” she confesses, her fingers reading his pulse like Braille. She doesn’t. She doesn’t._

_Her hand slips away._

 

“Your mother was a gypsy,” he says, aghast, staring at the things hoarded in the attic. There’s horror in his expression because dear god, the woman knew how to collect.

“I thought gypsy’s travelled lighter.”

Stiles is thirteen. It’s been two whole years - whole and hole – since she passed away and John’s only managed to bring himself to clear out her belongings now. He keeps his boy close, the whiskey bottle put aside for later that night. John frowns, he squeezes Stile’s shoulders once, the bones delicate under his hand, and doesn’t listen to the waver in his son’s voice, the inner monologue that warns two years is too soon for the both of them.

 

_“I wouldn’t know how to put down roots,” she smiled.  There were dimples when she grinned and her eyes were mischievous._

_John had looked between her jeep and his booking sheet and felt something realign. He’d written down her surname then fumbled her given name, too many letters - they fell out of order into an unruly heap - they didn’t make **any** kind of sense. _

_“You can call me Andy,” she offered, and when he quirked an eyebrow she shrugged. “It’s an abbreviation, the only one I’m willing to give.”_

_  
_

Andy. An. Mrs Stilinski. Mom.

“Your mother was a terrible, terrible liar.” John looks around at the things she kept, the things she squirreled away.

“I knew I inherited it from someone.”

John cuffs him, lightly, over the back of the head. His son skips forward a step and squints over his shoulder.

“Which I shouldn’t do, obviously – lying, that is - unless it’s for recreational purposes like sleeping, which is totally acceptable.”

John had thrown everything into the attic holus-bolus when his wife passed away, thrown it out of sight with the promise he would sort it out later. But he had an eleven year old boy to console, a job and shift hours to contend with, medical prescriptions to buy, alcohol to consume, worried school councillors’, and a grief that was gnawing at him, slow and vicious as a rat’s teeth. A bone deep ache that wouldn’t settle. Those first few months were a blur of whiskey and self-loathing, until he realised Stiles had gone from ADHS (restless energy) to A-D-H-S (frantic and brittle as spun glass). His son spoke a mile a minute, leapt from one topic to another, filled up all of John’s silences…and An’s too. John would come home to find all the bottles hidden, his cigarettes shredded into neat piles of tobacco. He’d come home to an explosion of self-raising flour and eggs, his kitchen buried under the detritus of chocolate surprise! Or meatloaf hard enough to perpetrate a bodily crime with, accompanied by a lonely bushel of broccoli. He’d come home to find Stiles shouting her name – not mommy, not mom – but her _name_ until his voice was hoarse and his body strung out in John’s arms like a live wire. Each exhalation an earthquake, juddering limbs and cheeks stained wet. John said a lot of things that night, voice rusty with disuse. He said _I’m sorry._ He said _I won’t leave you alone with it._   He didn’t ask his boy to promise the same because Stiles was eleven and he hadn’t, raging against John’s blind grief like a hurricane. He said _I miss her._ He said _I love you. You’re the only thing I have left._ And Stiles had hiccupped, pressed into him that much harder, refusing to speak for once. He said, desperately, _I won’t drink._

_Ever?_

_Not to the point of intoxication. One glass and no more, I’ll even let you measure it out for me._

And he thinks, maybe, that was the last night they were ever completely honest with each other.

“It’s going to be a one-glass night, isn’t it?” Stiles asks now. He has a yellow booking form in hand, the impound ticket John Stilinski wrote to An all those years ago, his writing smudged and her given name illegible. It was pressed between the pages of a photo-album.

John stares at it and says hoarsely. “I’ll let you have a sip of mine.”

Turns out Stiles is exactly like his mother. He’ll write his given name down on official records if needed but never speaks it aloud. He introduces himself simply as Stiles – and like An – he has no tolerance for alcohol.

 

***

 

The four hours his son is missing are the worst four hours in John’s life. Bar none.

He can feel something black and frantic torque his spine. He flaunts regulation and sends out an APB on Stiles, he organises an enquiry into Jackson’s death. He ignores the fear battering against his rib cage, prying his bones apart, wet and gleaming. John organises the kids on the lacrosse field, tries his best to keep them separate; but he doesn’t have enough staff on hand to make it viable and the kids do what human beings have being doing since the dawn of time: they converge together and swap stories, borrow each other’s perception, shift their own tales into a pale imitation of one another. He hears their voices and tries to forget his own, calling out for his son under a black sky, not saying Stiles' given name because he refused to hand him over, surrender his boy to someone else’s grace. Where is my son? - he shouts, and it rolls through him like thunder – a threat of murder.

He interviews the parents, speaks to both Scott and Isaac, he drives home at a walker’s pace, takes the side-streets, stops at every public park, checks the fast-food joints, until the nose of his vehicle points toward home. He replays the lacrosse game, from badly hidden embarrassment to outright joy, the tempo of emotion at each goal scored, the way Stiles would check the stands, his grin contagious even from a distance, half obscured by the helmet.

John replays the lacrosse game and this time he ignores his son, tries to see the field again from a different perspective. The people on the outskirts, the shift of players, the way Jackson had moved, those crucial seconds before the lights went out. His hands clench into fists, it takes him half a minute before he can unlock the front door to his house. He takes the stairs one at a time, feet dragging like an old man.  John doesn’t know how to live  without the hyperactive presence of his child, the tangible evidence of An – as if too much energy had been compacted into Stiles slim frame; boarded up and sewn into his bones – tempered with  prescription medication. He drifts from one room to another, rattling the skeleton carcass of his too quiet home.

“Come on, Stiles,” he whispers, prayers. “Where are you?”

He can’t squeeze his eyes shut, make himself believe the way An had. John’s a cop.  He’s seen too much damage to subscribe to magic, too much cruelty and loss noted on his scorecard. He doesn’t have the ability to ignore evidence, to favour the imagination, but he squeezes his hands into fists, stands in the centre of Stiles’ room and allows himself to hope. He hopes with every fibre of his being.

“I’m right here.”

Standing in the doorway, he's bruised, lip bloody, but he's not an apparition.

They don't know how to be honest with each other, haven't been for a long time.  John stalks forward, muscles coiled, his voice rising into a shout, the anger shakes him to the foundations.  He means what he says, all those words that come out jumbled and wrong, pistol-whipping, and violence red in his vision, none of them are even _close_ to what he's trying to say. 

"Dad," Stiles says, and hugs him tight, one arm slung across his shoulders and a finger against his pulse-point.  He reads every emotion slamming through John's body like Braille.  "Dad," he says, voice fracturing.   "I'm okay."


End file.
